Multiple hypothesis tracking (MHT) is utilized to track multiple targets at the same time. MHT is generally described by Samuel S. Blackman in Multiple Hypothesis Tracking for Multiple Target Tracking, IEEE A&E Systems Magazine, Vol. 19, No. 1, January 2004, pages 5-18. In some scenarios, a plurality of targets is tracked via a track-oriented approach for hypothesis management which reconstitutes the global set of hypotheses from the list of tracks. The reconstitution of global hypotheses in the track-oriented approach is time consuming and the performance of this step significantly impacts MHT tracking performance. Furthermore, the reconstitution of global hypotheses within the track-based MHT is an NP-hard problem, and previous approaches (e.g., breadth-first search, depth-first search, etc.) are ad-hoc and do not provide performance guarantees. Also, current approaches to the reconstitution of the global hypotheses in the track-based MHT do not reliably find high ranking global hypotheses when the tracks are found in clusters with many families that contain singleton tracks (i.e., Type two clusters). In these situations, failure to find high ranking global hypotheses can lead to deletion of tracks in the best hypotheses and eventual loss of track on important targets. Thus, a need exists in the art for improved reconstitution of global hypotheses in track-based multiple hypothesis tracking.